Trump’s pick for counterrorism called for arresting BLM leaders as terrorists

Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who is Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, completed 11 combat deployments during the War on Terror. The combat left scars. In 2019, an ISIS suicide bomber killed his wife, a Navy cryptologist and linguist, in Syria. By the time he returned home, his worldview had shifted: Kent came to believe, as I wrote in a 2022 profile, that his early tours in Iraq gave him a “special gift of clarity.” He understood how quickly a society could come undone.

After this, Kent went from apolitical to active. The Black Lives Matter and antifa protests in Portland during the summer of 2020 triggered fears for him that the United States could similarly implode. Everything, he felt, was crumbling. He and his two young boys quickly left the city for rural Washington.

“We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations. We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists,” Kent said in a 2021 conversation with the podcaster Tim Pool about the group’s leaders. “So, when we start arresting these guys and charging them with federal terrorism charges, that’s going to take away a lot of the incentive to go out and riot.”

That is part of what makes putting Kent in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center so unsettling. He is a trained counterinsurgent who is now far more attuned to threats from within than those from overseas.

The idea that America could quickly collapse but for the vigilance of people like him could serve to justify any number of abuses of power. It was the origin of the political awakening that led to him launch two unsuccessful runs for Congress in 2022 and 2024 defined by his turn toward hard-right politics. 

If confirmed by the Senate, Kent will be a key player in the intelligence apparatus that helped push the United States into the wars he helped fight. The counterterrorism center he is set to lead is itself a response to the 9/11 attacks that shaped so much of his life. As its leader, Kent would work closely with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to share information with state and local law enforcement about potential terrorist threats. He is on track to report to former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, another Iraq-war veteran, who Trump has picked for Director of National Intelligence.

Under the law, the National Counterterrorism Center is not supposed to handle “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism.” But that provision may be less meaningful in an administration that is so obviously willing to violate democratic norms and Congressional intent.

To an unusual extent for an unapologetically MAGA figure, what even a liberal might make of Kent depends on what part of an interview they hear. When talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, he could be mistaken for Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.). Not only were those wars useless in his telling, they were corrupt conspiracies in which former Vice President Dick Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton enriched themselves with the blood of a volunteer army. (He frames the loss of America’s manufacturing base through a similar anti-elite lens.) 

Where Kent would lose a liberal or centrist listener is when he describes returning home to his hometown of Portland, Oregon, following the death of his wife in 2019. Kent made clear in the same interviews that he had come to see fellow citizens as akin to the insurgents he had once fought abroad. “We thought our war would just be overseas and that we would all come home and finally relax a little,” he has said. “But that’s just not the case.” As I wrote in 2022:

Kent is the candidate of our not-quite forever war bending back on itself. His campaign did not respond to interview requests, but he has laid out his worldview in hours-long interviews with fellow veterans and right-wing podcasters. The conversations make clear that his enemies are the generals he blames for the deaths of family and friends, the elites waging “hybrid warfare” against middle-class Americans, and groups like antifa and Black Lives Matter that operate as “organized crime syndicates” and “terrorist organizations.” He positions himself as a New Right class warrior. But unlike so many of the New Right’s leaders, who skew rich and Ivy League, Kent is not a campus reactionary now out in the world. He is a soldier radicalized by senseless wars.